C, the 1980's Porsche 911 of programming languages.

Drive it well and it's scary fast. Make a mistake and you're upside down in a ditch.

And it takes 30s for a dedicated amateur to break in and steal it.

It's true that in the UK, the vast majority of us drive manuals for no other reason than to maintain our practice at driving manuals.

I drive mostly manual, because of the price difference on car prices here in Europe.

Driving conditions can vary a huge lot. Stuck in city traffic, there's nothing to gain from manual stick. But if you are coming down a steep mountain road or running a car race, you want to use your engine to brake as well as to accelerate. As far as I know, in such a case, manual is unbeatable.

> As far as I know, in such a case, manual is unbeatable.

I guess that was a big mistake for F1 and other sport cars to have adopted semi-automatic gear boxes then.

From Wikipedia:

> A semi-automatic transmission ... is an automobile transmission that does not change gears automatically, but rather facilitates manual gear changes by dispensing with the need to press a clutch pedal at the same time as changing gears.

I wasn't talking about clutch-and-stick vs. push-a-button. I was talking about controlling which gear is on vs. letting the car guess alone. I've never heard about race cars where the driver does not decide himself which gear is on at which moment; if you have, thanks for letting me learn something new.

I don't know of a lot of F1/automatic gear cars being involved in steep terrain where the engine braking scenario would come into its own.

The grandpartent comment clearly says "or running a car race" as another example.

That said, I see no reason why a (semi-)automatic couldn't engine brake.

> I see no reason why a (semi-)automatic couldn't engine brake.

The semi surely can. The full automatic, I don't know. How can the car understand that you want a lower gear before you touch the brake?

I understand, my point was that manual shift cars are used in every discipline where such things matter like rally driving afaik

You mean like WRC?

Better update yourself.

The Subaru Impreza WRC2004 gearbox does a gear change in 0.05s vs 1s taken by the best manual ones.

http://m.crash.net/wrc/feature/112516/1/technical-talk-semia...

Do you know any WRC driver able to beat that?

> I wonder if C programmers only drive manual.

FWIW, I mostly program in C and I drive automatic. C enables me to be a control freak with my code, but I don't really have a need or desire to be a control freak with other things in my life…